Disney Gifts

Day 279...

So today has been a day of getting jobs done with the first task of the day being to collect the weekly grocery shop from my supermarket of choice.

We saw our usual store colleague, Marky Mark, so it was nice to be able to wish him a 'happy Christmas'. I will admit to this being a bigger than normal weekly shop...think I fell foul of a 'well it's Christmas' attitude while shopping as I'm sure we have more than we actually need!

Packing everything into the fridge was like playing a game of Tetris and woah behold anyone who doesn't put things back in the right place!!

I then had the pleasure of getting all the ironing completed - whoop! Simon has spent the day working on his R2D2 build; a laborious job of masking off all the many, many, many parts ready for spray painting and followed by an afternoon of spray painting all said parts in a silver to get a metal appearance.

The podcast I co-host has created a special Facebook page called 'Disney Dream Girls Podcast Family'; a page where a group of us can get together, swap Disney stories and share what's happening in our lives. This year we decided to set up a 'Christmas gift exchange'; everyone who wanted to join in the fun added themselves to a list and specified whether they wanted to exchange with someone in their own country or from abroad.

I joined in the fun and was partnered with Donna in the US. We chatted online to agree a budget and specify any likes or dislikes. I decided to buy Donna a Disney Key Christmas ornament as she had mentioned she collected the keys and then I included a range of quintessential British chocolate and sweets along with some park maps from Disneyland Paris. Today my parcel arrived from Donna and I was blown away...

The contents of my parcel - just love that Star Wars paper!

...wow! So some Disney socks, well socks are a Christmas must have! A Mike Wazowski clip (which has made its way to Molly's collection of Monsters Inc items!), a Baby Yoda hanging ornament (this is now sitting on top of the mouse droid in our living room...but will stay out all year round), some Jolly Rancher sweets and my all time favourite...Midnight Dark Milky Way...in mini form!!!

There was some lovely Disney tissue paper which has been saved as well as a couple of  leaflets from the Disney Store in the US; one of which was a pop-out hanging decoration..

This is now hanging on my tree!

Such a lovely parcel to receive and this gift exchange has created so many lovely and thoughtful surprises for people around the world; truly encapsulating the essence of giving at Christmas.

And to round out today I best stop typing and go wrap some presents!!

Take care out there.

xx

Ebay & Disney Quiz

Day 172...

So last night turned into a bit of a marathon session on my jigsaw, hadn't intended to but the 'I'll just put a few pieces in' turned into 'quite a lot of pieces' and although not yet done I have made a fair bit of progress but it was rather a late night!

Which meant it was a slow start to the morning with the first job being to update my grocery shop online ready for collection tomorrow. And with that out the way I had the task of setting up more items for sale via Ebay, another 13 items. Plus as the day moved on I started to see sales coming through for the items I had put online last week!

Simon has made contact with a couple of relatives who we can now send a stack of family photographs to. But the lovely thing has been making a re-connection with family members who, for one reason and another, we have not been in touch with for quite awhile. They have expressed their gratitude at being thought of and are looking forward to being able to add to their own families memories. As a result we now have excuses to go visit different parts of the country.

Mid-afternoon I took a coffee outside to soak up some sunshine and prepare for this evening's Disney Dream Girls quiz as I needed to come up with some questions. So as it was Pluto's 90th birthday I decided to produce some Pluto based questions along with a couple about the iconic attraction, as well as one of my favourites, at Walt Disney World; the Carousel of Progress.

Simon has been busy casting parts for a helmet order that he received this weekend as well as a bit more work on the 3D parts he has printed for his R2D2 build. Although at one point he did have to rebuild part of the 3D printer as a print he set off this morning decided to not print as it should, but a quick replacement of a part and we are now back up and running.

Amongst the items that we have inherited from Simon's mums house we found an old audio tape that was made when some of Simon's relatives were living in Australia which we have tracked down, by way of his Dad's diary, to 1974!. We think the tape, once it had been recorded on one side was sent out to Australia and was then returned with their recording on the other side. Thankfully we had a tape machine that Simon could hook up to his laptop to then transfer the audio. The amazing thing is that Simon has been able to 'clean up' the audio track and cannot only hear his own voice as a child (which sounds remarkably like our own son did at the same age) but he can also listen to his parents, aunts, uncles, cousins and his grandparents; it's all been quite emotional at times. But thank goodness for modern technology that we have been able to preserve this and, like the photos, make a digital copy that we will now be able to listen to whenever we like as well as share with other relatives so that they can hear themselves and others who are no longer with us.

The afternoon was rounded out with the now usual Sunday Dream Girls Disney quiz which was, as always, lovely to chat to people from around the world, share what we have been up to, our plans for the coming week as well as attempt to answer a few Disney questions. I think my score this week was just 4 points, but it really isn't about the points but the connections and the giggles.

Stay safe out there, keep your distance and wear a mask.
xx

Day 58

Day 58...

The morning started with a special delivery. Through doing the Disney Dream Girls podcast and being part of the Disney community I have made lots of new friends, most of whom I have never even met. One of these Disney loving friends, Angie, has been making (amongst lots of other creative endeavours) face masks...Disney ones of course and this morning mine arrived and they are fab! I figure if I have to wear a mask in future I'm going to try and make it as fun an experience as I can and bring a little Disney magic to it.

The twist in this tale is that the masks should have arrived yesterday...and in fact they did but not at my house. Late yesterday morning I took a call on pre-school's phone from a lady asking to speak to me and explaining she had a parcel for me. I was a tad confused because I'd not ordered anything for pre-school and she then went on to apologise for opening the parcel and said it was some masks. At that point I knew what the parcel was but couldn't figure out how this lady was phoning me on pre-school's phone number. The courier had my email and landline number but not my mobile number and definitely not pre-school's number. So we arranged for her to drop the parcel around this morning which she dutifully did and I thanked her by giving her some Hotel Chocolate mini slabs that I happened to have in. So I asked her...'how did you find me?'...turns out she googled me! Well that's a first!

Today was then split between a little work; mainly reading more government documents and to be honest I had to stop reading because my eyes were crossing! Next I made a couple of cakes; one is for a special occasion tomorrow (more details later) and the second was a low carb banana bread which is lovely. Then this afternoon I did some more podcast recording with the lovely Michelle for our Disney Dream Girls show and today we chatted with Seth Kubersky who works for The Unofficial Guides and was chatting to us about the re-opening of Universal Studios CityWalk area yesterday.

More podcast recording

Simon has been busy this week making helmets and has now cast three using the new mold and one from the existing mold. After cleaning them up he took over the kitchen to wash them!

And the finished four...

Oh and in amongst all that we still managed to get out for a couple of miles walk at lunchtime! Another surprisingly busy day, and tomorrow we have another lockdown birthday to celebrate!

xx

Day 49

Day 49...

Well today has been another mix of work and chill. A few emails checked and dealt with, some interesting links followed, articles read and information gleaned and stored.

Today we received an order from an online butchers that I had placed at the beginning of the lockdown when I was struggling to get some items on my normal grocery shop. So I took the plunge and placed an order even though the delivery was at that point about 5 weeks away. Well today it arrived and I had to get Molly to move the box from the front door to the kitchen for me because I couldn't lift it...12kg of meat...think we might be ok for a while...although being the carnivore family that we are...

Simon and I took our usual walk out at lunchtime in the glorious sunshine and decided to walk over the fields today.

I then enjoyed a relaxed afternoon of sitting outside drinking coffee, topping up my vitamin D and reading my current book by Dr Ted Naiman called The P:E Diet...

...along with completing my current jigsaw...

...looks like I'll have to start a new one tomorrow so I may have to place another order so I have one ready and waiting for when I complete it!

Simon has spent an hour or so out in the garage this evening as the resin he needed for fibre glassing arrived today which has meant he has been able to complete the other half of the outer shell of his Mandalorian helmet mold.

Molly has spent her day sorting through all her photography work and is just in the process of re-organising the digital files which sounds like a mammoth job and one where she will probably need yet another hard disk. You can see some of her work on her website for Shutter Studios.This evening she took over the living room to complete her karate class online via Zoom!

So all in all a pretty decent day in our house.

Stay safe xx

Day 45

Day 45...

And it's the weekend! And the sun is shining after a very grey week!

First job of the day was for me and Molls to head off to get our click and collect grocery shop. Very happy that we were collecting today as I think the queue into the store was one of the longest we'd seen. Saturday morning wouldn't be my choice of shopping day ordinarily at the best of times as I never want shopping to interfere with weekend plans but today it was a case of going with whatever delivery slot I could get. The great thing was that when we parked up at the lockers one of the store employees (who me and Molls affectionately call Marky Mark - not to his face though), was there, saw us and brought our shopping straight to us - no messing!

Once home we had the job of wiping everything down and getting rid of what packaging we could before we could put it all away.

Simon has spent the day building a new helmet mold which has involved multiple layers of latex being applied to the master helmet which is a long process as it's apply a layer...leave it...apply a layer...leave it and so on! This is the progress so far but there is still a long way to go yet;

Initial thin layers

Mixing latex solution and catalyst

More layers going on and many more needed

My afternoon was helping Simon where I could as in between helmet mold making he was sorting out his work space; a compact area that has lots of cables...lots and lots of cables...my main job was supplying the coffee! Oh and a little more online birthday shopping! Oops!

It is sometime hard to grasp the situation that we are in at the moment on days like today when we have had a pretty ordinary day, in fact the sort of weekend day we would have had prior to all this virus malarkey. Watching a YouTube video by Dr Hope's Sick Notes it really brought home what is happening to those at the front line and how awful this virus is and just how long this is all going to go on for. Please pop over and give his videos a watch for a insight into what our NHS are coping with.

It makes it really hard seeing social media posts from people who are blatantly ignoring the guidelines to stay at home, people venturing further afield than they are supposed to and meeting up with people outside of their household. Do people not understand that stay at home means stay at home and not pop round to your 'insert name of designated individual'...you may think you're being safe but it really is a slap in the face for the rest of us who are making sacrifices to do as we are told.

My heart breaks for my Molly and her fella as they have not been able to see each other now since this whole thing cracked off. They had weekends booked off work and plans to do things that simply have not been able to happen. They live 190 miles apart as it is so their time together has always been that bit more precious so when I see others flaunting the rules so blatantly it really does make me quite mad!

We all need to be in this together, it is not one rule for one and one for another we must all do the same. Stay home, simple...

xx

Day 44

Day 44...

Last day of the working week and we were actually up and about pretty early today which turned out to be a good thing as Simon sold another Mandalorian helmet! So first job of the morning was packing and posting it out to the US.

Next job was the online grocery shop as tomorrow is pick up day! Which took me way longer than I would have liked; time spent finding alternatives to unavailable items and noticing a fair few items with price changes and not in the direction I would have preferred!

There was also a little more online birthday shopping followed by trying to track down icing sugar of all things. Molly's birthday is in about 10 days or so and she has plans to bake her own birthday cake which needs icing sugar to make the required buttercream. Now I do enjoy baking and I think Molly has picked this up from me, although she's a lot more adventurous than I am, but being a low carb house it's not something we do that often and consequently I don't tend to keep baking items in the cupboard. So as there was no icing sugar available via the online grocery shop my next option was Amazon (of course) which would be great if I wanted to buy in bulk or wanted a flavoured icing sugar (which I didn't even know existed) but that won't be delivered until Molly's actual birthday (at the earliest)...wonder if I could wrap it as a present for her!!

Lunchtime saw our usual 2 mile walk despite the grey clouds and a few spots of rain as we returned home we still managed a good pace. Thankfully the rest of the afternoon brightened up and ended with a bright and sunny evening.

This afternoon I spent a lovely hour or so chatting with my friend Michelle and recording a new podcast episode with her. It was lovely to chat away and hear how well she is doing with this horrid virus; she sounded so much better than when we last spoke and although it has really taken it out of her she is getting there. She has another test tomorrow to determine whether she is now negative...fingers crossed for her.

Knowing someone who has been diagnosed with this awful virus really helps to confirm that this is a disease that we need to stop and that the only way we can do this is to keep this lockdown going for as long as we need to. I really think an approach of 'slow and steady' wins the race is needed; there is no point in jumping back into normal life too soon only to have to go back into lockdown later on. Let's get this thing sorted now; let's adopt an attitude of a bit of inconvenience now is going to save us all so much in the future. And while we all do that can the government please get themselves organised with testing, PPE, research into treatments and vaccine and formatting a plan out of this..Oh and please make sure our NHS staff get the rewards they deserve? Don't think that's too much to ask?!

xx